On a side, but related note; all our societies need to reevaluate the corporate protections from personal liability when the activities breach the articles of incorporation, the so called veil; barring demonstrated accident or mistake.
This "corporate veil" and protection is really the same basis as the legal fiction called "qualified immunity"... in the case of police officers, they can even quite literally murder you with impunity in far too many cases that is acceptable. Isn't it odd how a "citizen" who is supposed to actually be in control of the government through self-determination, has approaching zero power, bu the putrid agents of the despotic power of illegitimate government have literal immunity to commit murder.
This kind of activity is not just a corporate whoopsie, it's active, deliberate, criminal activity, and organized criminal activity at that; making in this case (but there are many other examples) Meta an organized criminal outfit.
Are you personally immune from prosecution if a "corporation" tells you to murder someone? Why would you then not be personally criminally liable for perpetrating other crimes because the "corporation" told you to do it; regardless of whether that is committing cybercrimes, committing financial fraud, or even just something as simple as breach of the peace if a manager is accosting an employee?
I'm for more personal liability, but corporate higher-ups are pretty good at communicating their illegal desires to subordinates without saying the illegal part out loud.
I think the corporate death penalty is underused. Being in leadership when a corporation is dissolved for committing crimes is probably bad for one's future employment prospects.
Except they keep failing upwards
I wonder if the RICO act could be applied...
It's never rico.
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/60509/what-is-the-th...
Could it be that the problem is actually prosecutorial discretion?
In Sweden we have something called an absolute duty to prosecute, which means that for most crimes, if there's evidence and enough to get a conviction, the prosecutor has an actual absolutely duty to prosecute.
So if this had happened here, I could report this to the police as 'unapproved intelligence activity against a person' and the prosecutor would have to, provided that there's enough evidence, prosecute the person for this.
Prosecutors here do have a love of dismissing things due to lack of evidence though.
I don't think the "veil" is even relevant here. We have the smoking-gun proof that Mark Z. personally ordered people to illegally spy on other apps' data. And yet, he's walking free. Do we think he's reformed? Or is he probably going to do the same thing again as soon as he gets the chance, knowing that he got away with it once before?
>I don't think the "veil" is even relevant here. We have the smoking-gun proof that Mark Z. personally ordered people to illegally spy on other apps' data.
No, Zuckerberg said to "get reliable analytics" and that maybe they need to "do panels or write custom software". The subsequent emails of "hey I made an app that does MITM on snapchat" did not involve Zuckerberg.
If I were a lawyer trying to defend Zuckerberg, in a court where we take turns pontificating in front of a jury, and I wanted to do some lying by omission and hope that is the one thing that sticks in their minds, I'd probably say exactly what you just wrote.
But this is the court of public opinion, and people are going to read your post about 5 seconds before they read mine, so that won't work. I think online debate is a lot better at getting to the truth than courts of law, actually. So while Zuckerberg may be ruled innocent, we can put him in the same category as OJ Simpson and Donald Trump and carefully caveat our assertions that he's guilty with "in my opinion" to avoid a slander case.
Of course, what you said is false. He didn't just shoot off an email with "get reliable analytics!", as you put it, like some kind of whimsical silly CEO on a kid's cartoon. He said: "their (instagram's) data is encrypted and we have no analytics about them" (seemingly implying that if their data wasn't encrypted, they would have data about it, because they would just spy on it). He then immediately proceeds to say they need to "get reliable analytics about them". He THEN immediately proceeds to clarify by saying that they might need to "write custom software" and that "you should figure out how to do this" (seems like a subtle hint that they should "figure out" his subtext here).
And then, what do you think happened? His underlings went rogue and developed iOS hacks that would allow them to decrypt traffic, and he didn't approve it or know about it? If this were court, that would probably be a good argument to achieve a not guilty verdict.
So while you're probably right that this doesn't qualify as a "smoking gun" in court, it should convince everyone who's capable of reading it.
Or it did involve Zuckerberg and his team and him were smart enough not to put in email/chat.
1. regardless of whether zuckerberg was actually involved or not, the evidence presented so far isn't a "smoking gun".
2. they're apparently smart enough to not put it down on email, but apparently Ferrante (a Director of Data Science, according to a hardvard site) was too dumb and wrote a email that said "yep, we made an app that does MITM attacks on snapchat"?
"Will no one rid me of this troublesome data encryption?"